Water, Water Everywhere

The novelist Jennifer Egan has said she likes each of her books to be quite different from the last, and in tone and subject matter they are. Manhattan Beach is the first novel she has published since 2010’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won countless awards including the Pulitzer Prize and sold 300,000 copies in the United States alone. It was a loose confederation of 13 stories set in the music industry, often highly experimental in form. Manhattan Beach, by contrast, is an old-fashioned historical novel about a young woman growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930s and ’40s. It has a grand, 19th-century elasticity: There are confusions of love, parties, shoot-outs, shipwrecks, and torrid, meaningful sex. But however varied Egan’s subjects and her narrative approach, her themes are constant: identity, transformation, and the desperate illusions of finding fulfillment.

Phoebe, the protagonist of her first novel, The Invisible Circus (1996), is out to discover the “real” world, one she believes her dead elder sister Faith had embraced. Phoebe thinks her present life is “nothing but the aftermath of something vanished,” and hence phony. The vanished something she seeks is the tumult of the 1960s and what it wrought: Haight-Ashbury, Swinging London, May 1968 Paris, and the Berlin of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Ten years after all this tumult has ended, Phoebe heads for Europe, following Faith’s tracks to their sorry end. In doing so, she exorcises her sister’s ghost and discovers her own real world.

Many of Egan’s characters feel Phoebe’s sense of deprivation, as though they are forever teetering on the verge of fulfillment. The tension Egan builds between a safe commonplace existence and the rash and often disillusioning life of adventure is the roiling heart of her remarkable work. When the Illinoisan Charlotte Swenson, the heroine of Look at Me, is asked where she’s from, she says Chicago, rather than the more modest Rockford. “I grew up wanting to leave,” she tells us. Leaving or remaining is generally the sole choice for Egan’s protagonists. All else is at the whim of an arbitrary fate. But it is a choice; there is agency.

Charlotte is a fashion model. Following a disfiguring car crash, she needs to reinvent herself. It isn’t straightforward. Having recuperated in her hometown, she moves back to Manhattan. No one recognizes her. She takes to drink and drugs. She is a self-confessed liar (her age is a permanent 28), and happy to deceive and dissemble. She steals names (almost no character in an Egan novel is satisfied with just one name). The fashion industry is the perfect milieu in which to address the question of what is and isn’t “real,” and Egan has a good deal of satirical fun with it—including a horrifying scene with a razor blade, in which a director of TV commercials wants to cut Charlotte’s face “to get at some kind of truth, here, in this phony, sick, ludicrous world,” he says. “Something pure. Releasing blood is a sacrifice. It’s the most real thing there is.”

Egan isn’t interested in the reductive tribal identity that seems so vital to college students and social-justice warriors. She is concerned rather with whether you are or are not, in the formulation of another chief character in Look at Me, “what you see” (the book is full of reflective surfaces: rivers, glass, mirrors).

The novel features another Charlotte, also of Rockford, this one plain and shunned and determined to leave one school for another to find someone who will seduce her and allow her also to leave plain and shunned Charlotte behind.

At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her—separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she’d never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans.

She ends up disillusioned, but her daring echoes that of the model Charlotte—they are women prepared to take on fate.

By the end of Look at Me, there are multiple alternating narratives set in different time periods. The effect adds friction and ups the tension, and while Look at Me is to a large extent a novel of ideas, it has the drive of a thriller. It was also remarkably prescient. Published in the week of 9/11, it features a sleeper Middle Eastern terrorist, vainly attempting to resist the attractions of quotidian America (the Big Mac is a prime example: It “eases into his throat like a rat moving through a snake”). It also foretold reality TV and the tidal wave of narcissism that Twitter and Facebook have unleashed: “Being observed felt like an action, the central action—the only one worth taking. Anything else I might attempt seemed passive, futile by comparison.” It is into this world that Charlotte literally sells her name for “a sum that will keep myself and two or three others comfortable for the rest of our lives.” As in all of Egan’s stories, there is a redemptive conclusion, though at some cost, usually involving scales having slipped from the eyes of her lead characters.

The Keep, published five years later, is a peculiar gothic fiction with a prison inmate narrator. Is the tale he is telling true? An Internet-obsessed character called Danny (his most loved possession is his satellite dish) is invited by his cousin to help renovate a castle in some unnamed Ruritanian country. The idea is to open a hotel where guests become “tourists in their own imaginations.” The sense the reader has—is, I think, supposed to have—is that the book is being made up as you read, that the author is only a few pages in front of you.

It was followed by A Visit from the Goon Squad, a hybrid work that is, in Egan’s words, “a constellation of intersecting lives.” Egan mixes forms in a polyphony of voices. One of its chapters is told in the second person, another entirely in PowerPoint (interested always in the edge of things, Egan has also written a short story using Twitter called “Black Box”). Goon Squad could probably be read in an arbitrary order, except that it ends in the realms of science fiction (as Look at Me could also be said to do).

Insofar as there is a central character, it is pop impresario Bennie Salazar. We see him in the past as the member of a musical group, in the present despairing of modern pop, and in the future reigniting the career of an old bandmate. In one way or another, often only very marginally, the other characters of the novel are associated with him. His assistant Sasha is the subject of a chapter in which her uncle Ted comes looking for her in Naples, which provokes in Ted a memory of his own:

On a trip to New York, riding the Staten Island ferry for fun, because neither one of them had ever done it, Susan turned to him quite suddenly and said, “Let’s make sure it’s always like this.” And so entwined were their thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly why she’d said it: not because they’d made love that morning or drunk a bottle of Pouilly–Fuissé at lunch—because she’d felt the passage of time. And then, Ted felt it, too, in the leaping brown water, the scudding boats and wind—motion, chaos everywhere—and he’d held Susan’s hand and said, “Always. It will always be like this.”

Of course it won’t be, and it isn’t. The “goon squad” of the title is time itself. The book asks the question implicit in the preceding novels: Is there such a thing as a self, and if there is, how is it qualified by time and transformed by experience?

A Visit from the Goon Squad is an extraordinary exercise in narrative filigree, and a stunning literary achievement, but it is also quite hard to piece together. As in some editions of War and Peace, a graphic explaining the relationships between characters would have been helpful.

Not so for Manhattan Beach, which has one central narrative, the story of one Anna Kerrigan of Brooklyn. It is complemented by the stories of two men whose lives to an extent dominate, and are dominated by, hers. The three characters share only one scene, the first in the book. It is 1934. Twelve-year-old Anna and her father, Eddie, have gone to visit Italian mobster Dexter Styles at his house on Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. Eddie is looking for work, offering himself as a kind of spy who will report back on the running of Styles’s nightclubs. In taking on Eddie, Styles sets in motion all that is to follow. Styles and Anna are to meet again 10 years later, after Eddie has disappeared. Anna recognizes Styles, but he doesn’t know her. She assumes, not for the last time, a different name. There are developments.

Styles is impressed by both Kerrigans: “The toughness he’d sensed coiled in Ed Kerrigan had flowered into magnificence in the dark-eyed daughter.” This follows from an exchange between Styles and Anna after she takes off her shoes to paddle barefoot in the winter ocean. Water is important to Egan. It flows through all her work, and in all forms, from rain to snow, from lake to pool, from river to ocean. It functions both as a symbol and as an agent of change. “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever”—this, from Herman Melville, serves as the novel’s epigram. This passage is representative: “Anna watched the sea. There was a feeling she had, standing at its edge: an electric mix of attraction and dread. What would be exposed if all that water were to vanish? A landscape of lost objects: sunken ships, hidden treasure, gold and gems and the charm bracelet that had fallen from her wrist into a storm drain. Dead bodies, her father always said, with a laugh. To him, the ocean was a wasteland.”

Come Pearl Harbor, Anna finds work at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. During a lunch break, she observes divers at work repairing warships and is taken with the desire also to “walk along the bottom of the sea.” Knocking out a glass ceiling in the shape of a condescending instructor, she becomes a diver. Egan’s research into the complicated early mechanics of diving, as into much else in this novel, is worthy of Tom Wolfe or Dickens, and comfortably integrated.

The book is full of Egan tropes. Anna’s story involves a beautiful damaged sibling (as does little Charlotte’s in Look at Me), an absent father (as in The Invisible Circus), a struggle to prove herself in a masculine environment (as faced by several of the women in Goon Squad), and a series of partial and then eventually complete transformations (all of Egan’s work), but then “the idea of transformation appealed to Anna.” Manhattan Beach ends as Look at Me does, with a sloughing off of previous identity, and escape.

The male characters are likewise looking for an alteration to their lives, in curiously similar ways. Eddie has “a restless, desperate wish for something to change”; Styles hungers for “a sense of motion, of new things approaching.” One of them pays for his inconstancy; the other demonstrates his fidelity in unexpected circumstances.

In a paragraph toward the science-fictional end of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a newly introduced character has written a book “on the phenomenon of word casings,” which is “a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—‘friend’ and ‘real’ and ‘story’ and ‘change’—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks.”

These are words that continue to mean something to Jennifer Egan. Long may she strive to keep them from encasement.

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Water, Water Everywhere

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Can a right-wing American writer help spark a resistance movement inside the U.K. Labour party? Probably not. But these aren’t ordinary times. There is a great danger looming inside Labour. Its shadow extends from the British Isles across the West, including the United States. That danger has a name, Jeremy Corbyn, and there is a duty to prevent his ever coming to lead Her Majesty’s Government.

The latest revelations about the Labour leader—that in 2014 he laid a wreath at the graves of several Palestinian terrorists, including the masterminds of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre—underscore the urgency of the task. As the Daily Mail reported on Friday, Corbyn was photographed honoring the burial site of members of Black September, the terror group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes in Munich.

“One picture places Mr. Corbyn close to the grave of another terrorist, Atef Bseiso, intelligence chief of the Palestine Liberation Organisation,” per the Mail. “Another image shows the Labour leader apparently joining in an Islamic prayer while by the graves.”

His Labour handlers claimed Corbyn was there to commemorate some four-dozen Palestinian militants killed in an Israeli air strike against a Tunisian PLO base. But hang on: “On a visit to the cemetery this week, the Daily Mail discovered that the monument to the air strike victims is 15 yards from where Mr. Corbyn is pictured—and in a different part of the complex. Instead he was in front of a plaque that lies beside the graves of Black September members.”

Corbyn himself has described the conference as one “searching for peace,” but the Daily Mail on Monday debunked that apologia, as well. The gabfest—titled the “International Conference on Monitoring the Palestinian Political and Legal Situation in the Light of Israeli Aggression”—featured leading members and ideologues for the Gaza-based terror outfit Hamas. One such leader, Oussama Hamdan, offered a “four-point vision to fight against Israel” and hailed Hamas’ “great success on the military and national levels.”

This comes on top of everything else we know about Corbyn’s Labour: the unreconstructed Stalinist party spokesman, the anti-Semitic outrages from local councilors and top MPs alike, the Labour leader’s stints as a broadcaster for state-run Iranian television, his invitations to Hamas and Hezbollah, which he has called “our friends.” And on and on and on. The noxious ideological fumes wafting from a once-honorable party of the center left are suffocating.

There was a time when conservatives, including Americans like yours truly, took a certain pleasure in Labour’s Corbynite woes. Corbyn was so extreme, the thinking went, that his hostile takeover of Labour would ensure Tory ascendance for a generation. The man’s goofy manners—his tweed jackets and bad ties, his bicycling and gardening—only added to the fun. But the joke stopped being funny long ago. The Tories under Prime Minister Theresa May are in a shambolic state, Brexit has stalled, the pound sterling is in a downward spiral, and the electorate is deeply polarized. He really could pull it off.

To avert that dreadful prospect, Britons of good will should set aside quotidian policy differences and rally around the “Never Corbyn” standard. The outcome of Brexit, taxes and welfare, immigration and the National Health Service—none of these questions is more important than ensuring that the Jew-baiting, Black September-honoring, Hamas-befriending crank from the People’s Republic of Islington gets nowhere near No. 10 Downing Street.

For the love of all that is good and just.

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On August 16, the Boston Globe will publish an editorial denouncing Donald Trump’s “dirty war on the free press.” They will not be alone. According to the Globe’s deputy editorial page editor, over 100 American newspapers ranging from major city dailies to local outlets will join with the paper in a united assault on this White House’s attacks on political media as the “enemy of the people.” The tension between media consumers and producers—regularly exacerbated by the president—has even been condemned in the United Nations. The institution’s outgoing high commissioner for human rights said that the president’s agitation verges on “incitement to violence”—a legitimate concern that justifiably haunts many of Trump’s domestic critics.

For some, the pretense of concern for civic decency and national comity melts away when those desirable conditions conflict with their team’s political imperatives. Among Donald Trump’s self-appointed phalanx in the conservative press, the fear that the president may again be creating the conditions for violence will be waved off. After all, the sources of this criticism are hardly objective, and Trump’s critics cannot be lent one inch of legitimacy lest they take a mile. But to dismiss the potential of incitement to produce anti-media violence is to be blind to the rhetoric-fueled political violence we’ve already witnessed in the Trump era. By and large, though, that violence is not the product of Trumpian incitement. Just the opposite; it appears to be the result of anti-Trump anxiety.

To mark the first anniversary of the terrible events in Charlottesville this weekend, a band of white nationalists just large enough to have gratuity included in their check descended on Washington D.C. There, they were confronted by a crowd of anti-racist demonstrators numbering in the hundreds. Between the counter-protesters, the journalists, and the police assigned to keep order, the handful of white supremacists who instigated this event quickly ceased to be of relevance. Unfortunately, the threat of civil unrest did not abate with the successful intimidation of the alt-right. The left’s more agitated elements quickly turned on the police and the press.

The anti-racist demonstrators paraded down the streets in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “All cops are racist, you better face it.” “No borders. No Wall. No USA at all,” another group of demonstrators shouted. “Last year they came w/ torches,” one of the protester’s banners read. “This year they come w/ badges.” The Washington Post reported that the demonstrators were confused and agitated by the large riot gear–clad police presence. That “confusion” led to a variety of confrontations, including one in Washington D.C. where an officer was pelted with objects and nearly torn off his motorcycle.

Police did not have it anywhere near as bad as the press. Demonstrators assaulted an NBC News reporter and tried to prevent him from filming the mass demonstration. “Fu** you, snitch ass news bitch,” yelled one demonstrator as he lunged at NBC News correspondent Cal Perry. ABC News reporter DeJuan Hoggard was confronted by protesters who were so agitated by the prospect of being filmed that they cut the audio cable on his recording equipment.

It would be ignorant to dismiss these and similar moves by potentially and actively violent left-wing organizations as the outbursts of an inchoate movement without an ethos. Anti-police violence and anti-media agitation are predicated on mature intellectual and organizing principles.

Mark Bray, a Dartmouth College historian and the author of Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street, explained that Antifa’s purpose is to “preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts.” As a movement, it “rejects the liberal notion that fascism is a school of thought worthy of open debate and consideration.” Writing in praise of Antifa’s “militant left-wing and anarchist politics,” the Nation’s Natasha Lennard mocked “civility-fetishizing” liberals who “cling to institutions.” Presumably, she meant institutions like the right of objectionable elements to peaceable assembly, or, in her words, “predictable media coverage decrying antifa militancy.” Animated by the increased visibility of white nationalism in the Trump era, Mother Jones published a less-than-condemnatory profile of the resolve of “left-wing groups” to resist white supremacy, which “sometimes goes beyond nonviolent protest—including picking up arms.”

These activists’ sentiments are not limited to the liberal fringe. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has picked up a failed liberal war on right-wing media’s credibility where the Barak Obama administration left off. The mayor has never been shy about dismissing Rupert Murdoch-owned properties like the New York Post and Fox News Channel, which he does not consider “real media outlets.” This weekend, de Blasio devoted himself to attacking these “tabloid” institutions for deliberately “increasing racial tensions” in America. In a world without these media outlets, “there would be less hate,” he said, “less appeal to racial division.” Given the political environment, you can see how this might be misconstrued as a call to action.

In the parlance of the militant activists on the streets, de Blasio is contending that these media outlets deserve to be “no-platformed.” And the mayor seems prepared to act on his exclusionary beliefs. When a credentialed Post reporter tried to approach the mayor this weekend at a public event, the mayor’s New York City Police Department security detail physically escorted the reporter out of de Blasio’s sight. As the Post correctly noted, the incident was not unlike the White House’s efforts to demonize CNN and bar its reporters from access to the White House.

The prospect of imminent violence resulting from white supremacist and anti-media fervor recklessly whipped up by the president needs to be urgently and forcefully confronted. As I and others have written, Trump’s penchant for demonizing the press and flattering his most unsavory supporters has the potential to radicalize his more unstable fans, who perhaps cannot see through the act. But the same is true for liberals. Their popular elected officials are demonizing media they don’t like, blaming them for racial tension in America and deeming them, in effect, fake news. Their left flanks are populated by ghoulish polemicists who are role-playing at violent revolutionary politics. And amid all this, the potential exists for these ingredients to yield precisely the kind of bloodshed that the press fears Trump may be inviting.

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The COMMENTARY podcast discusses the weekend of unrest that followed the one-year anniversary of white nationalist-instigated violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Despite vastly outnumbering the white nationalists who showed up to commemorate the heinous anniversary, many of the anti-racist demonstrators were not content to be peaceful. The podcast explores what animates these violent movements. Also, the podcast unpacks the increasingly serious friction between the U.S. and Turkey.

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Much hasbeenwritten here at COMMENTARY about Harvard’s ill-conceived war on “unrecognized single-gender organizations.” At issue are fraternities, sororities, and Harvard’s famously exclusive “finals clubs.” All of these groups already lack official status at Harvard, but starting with the class of 2021, Harvard promises to punish anyone who dares to join one. Such heretics “will not be permitted to hold leadership positions in recognized student organizations or on athletic teams.” They will also “not be eligible for letters of recommendation” from the Dean’s office for scholarships, including the prestigious Rhodes and Marshall, that require such a recommendation. In the name of inclusion, they must be excluded.

As Harvard explained, “the final clubs, in particular, are a product of another era, a time when Harvard’s student body was all male, culturally homogeneous, and overwhelmingly white and affluent.” Which is why—I wish I were kidding—sororities must be destroyed. On August 5th, Harvard’s chapter of Delta Gamma sorority announced that it would shut down. Wilma Johnson Wilbanks, president of Delta Gamma’s national organization, said that Harvard’s new policy “resulted in an environment in which Delta Gamma could not thrive.”

Harvard has gamely asserted that the sororities are part of the same ancient culture of privilege and exclusion as the finals clubs. And sororities play a minor role—the main villains are the “deeply misogynistic” all-male finals clubs—in the 2016 report on sexual assault at Harvard that launched the push for the new policy. But Harvard’s Delta Gamma chapter, founded in 1994, is an unintended casualty of a policy designed to crush all-male clubs. Harvard had initially planned to allow female-only clubs to remain “gender-focused” for five years after the new policy went into effect. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a critic of the new policy, pointed out, such special treatment probably would have violated Title IX, a civil rights law that governs campuses that receive federal funding.

The relevant section of Title IX reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title IX would seem to prevent Harvard from punishing men for belonging to all-male fraternities if it does not also punish women for belonging to all-female sororities.

Although one cannot prove that a lawyer whispered in Harvard’s ear, this Title IX problem may well explain why Harvard quietly dropped the five year grace period for sororities. But it might also explain why sororities were dragged into the new policy in the first place. If Harvard had gone to war solely with all-male clubs, its lawyers would have had the hard task of explaining why, under Title IX, a university can “decide that women’s groups can exist but men’s cannot.”

To win its war against misogyny, Harvard had to sacrifice sisterhood.

After all, Harvard’s justification for attacking single-sex organizations made liberal use of the term “diversity.” The university undoubtedly sympathized with the protesters who, reading out of the diversity playbook, insisted that all-women organizations are “safe spaces” for women. “Change is hard,” they said. What they meant was: “if we want to protect women we’ll need to take away their freedom of association.”

If you want to make a social justice omelet, you have to break some eggs.

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When President Donald Trump first floated the idea of creating an entirely new branch of the United States armed forces dedicated to space-based operations in March, the response from lay political observers was limited to bemused snickering. That mockery and amusement have not abated in the intervening months. Thursday’s announcement by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, that the administration plans to establish a sixth armed forces branch by 2020, occasioned only more displays of cynicism, but it shouldn’t have. This is deadly serious stuff. The expansion and consolidation of America’s capacities to defend its interests outside the atmosphere is inevitable and desirable.

Though you would not know it from those who spent the day chuckling to themselves over the prospect of an American space command, the militarization of this strategically vital region is decades old. Thousands of both civilian and military communications and navigations satellites operate in earth orbit, to say nothing of the occasional human. It’s impossible to say how many weapons are already stationed in orbit because many of these platforms are “dual use,” meaning that they could be transformed into kill vehicles at a moment’s notice.

American military planners have been preoccupied with the preservation of critical U.S. communications infrastructure in space since at least 2007, when China stunned observers by launching a missile that intercepted and destroyed a satellite, creating thousands of pieces of debris hurtling around the earth at speeds faster than any bullet.

America’s chief strategic competitors—Russia and China—and rogue actors like Iran and North Korea are all committed to developing the capability to target America’s command-and-control infrastructure, a lot of which is space-based. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified in 2017 that both Moscow and Beijing are “considering attacks against satellite systems as part of their future warfare doctrine” and are developing the requisite anti-satellite technology—despite their false public commitments to the “nonweaponization of space and ‘no first placement’ of weapons in space.”

Those who oppose the creation of a space branch object on a variety of grounds, some of them merit more attention than others. The contention that a sixth military branch is a redundant waste of taxpayer money, for example, is a more salient than cynical claims that Trump is interested only in a glory project.

“I oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions,” Sec. Mattis wrote in October of last year. That’s a perfectly sound argument against excessive bureaucratization and profligacy, but it is silent on the necessity of a space command. Both the Pentagon and the National Security Council are behind the creation of a “U.S. Space Command” in lieu of the congressional action required to establish a new branch of the armed forces dedicated to space-based operations.

As for bureaucratic sprawl, in 2015, the diffusion of space-related experts and capabilities across the armed services led the Air Force to create a single space advisor to coordinate those capabilities for the Defense Department. But that patch did not resolve the problems and, in 2017, Congress’s General Accountability Office recommended investigating the creation of a single branch dedicated to space for the purposes of consolidation.

It is true that the existing branches maintain capabilities that extend into space, which would superficially make a Space Force seem redundant. But American air power was once the province of the U.S. Army and Navy, and bureaucratic elements within these two branches opposed the creation of a U.S. Air Force in 1947. The importance of air power in World War II and the likelihood that aircraft would be a critical feature of future warfighting convinced policymakers that a unified command of operations was critical to effective warfighting. Moreover, both Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman believed that creating a separate branch for airpower ensured that Congress would be less likely to underfund the vital enterprise.

The final argument against the militarization of space is a rehash of themes from the Cold War. Low earth orbit, like the seafloor and the Antarctic, is part of the “global commons,” and should not be militarized on principle. This was the Soviet position, and Moscow’s fellow travelers in the West regularly echoed it. But the argument is simply not compelling.

The Soviets insisted that the militarization of space was provocative and undesirable, but mostly because they lacked the capability to weaponize space. The Soviets regularly argued that any technology it could not match was a first-strike weapon. That’s why they argued vigorously against deploying missile interceptors but voiced fewer objections to ground-based laser technology. As for the “global commons,” that’s just what we call the places where humans do not operate for extended periods of time and where resource extraction is cost prohibitive. The more viable the exploration of these hostile environments becomes, the less “common” we will eventually consider them.

Just as navies police sea lanes, the inevitable commercialization of space ensures that its militarization will follow. That isn’t something to fear or lament. It’s not only unavoidable; it’s a civilizational advance. Space Force may not be an idea whose time has come, but deterrence is based on supremacy and supremacy is the product of proactivity. God forbid there comes a day on which we need an integrated response to a state actor with capabilities in space, we will be glad that we didn’t wait for the crisis before resolving to do what is necessary.

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